Language and marketing strategies in healthcare and corporate websites: The case of the American HHS

The marketing and communication strategies adopted by healthcare institutions are gradually assimilating to those of the corporate sector. Potential patients are shifting to the role of customers more than ever. This paper analyses the hybridisation process that healthcare and business discourses are undergoing today. Through the study of healthcare selected websites as opposed to corporate ones, there emerges that not only has the language of business permeated healthcare communication, but that also companies are in turn employing some transparency and ethically-related communication strategies traditionally belonging to the healthcare/medical domain. This is in part confirmed by the study carried out on the US institutional healthcare website (hhs.gov), a manifesto of Obama’s healthcare reform. The investigation is conducted from a critical discourse analysis and a multimodal analysis perspective.